CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil’s disastrous attempt to cover Donald Trump’s state visit to China hit yet another wall Thursday — this time as the MAGA-friendly network got out of their makeshift broadcast studio by hotel management unhappy with the on-air coverage of the China-Taiwan conflict.
Dokoupil had already been forced to report on Trump’s Beijing summit from Taipei — more than 1,000 miles away from where Trump and Chinese President Xi Jingping were meeting — after failing to secure a broadcast visa to enter mainland China. But according to Status, the setbacks didn’t stop there.
A Status source that the hotel’s manager that “was appalled” by the way which Dokoupil discussed Taiwan on air while Trump was sitting across from the Chinese president. The hotel subsequently barred him from using his room as a broadcast studio.
Dokoupil then moved his operation to Taipei’s Liberty Square — and addressed the debacle directly on Thursday night’s broadcast while reporting on the broader climate of fear surrounding China’s territorial claims over that nation.
“The threat of China is felt all over this island,” Dokoupil said on air. “One woman slapped her husband’s arm when he started talking to us about independence. Another woman asked that her words not be used, telling us ‘We cannot speak freely.’”
“And even at our hotel where, after seeing our broadcast last night, the manager told us we can’t cover anything political on their property,” he added.
The visa failure and hotel expulsion are the latest embarrassments for CBS News under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who was installed in the role by Paramount Skydance CEO and Trump ally David Ellison despite having no prior television news experience. Weiss has presided over a turbulent run that has included pulling a critical “Inside CECOT” segment about Trump’s deportation policies from 60 Minutes and ousting CBS News’ international chief Claire Day.
Dokoupil’s elevation to the flagship evening anchor slot has done little to reverse the network’s fortunes. His broadcast regularly draws fewer than 4 million viewers — a number one television executive described as a threshold that “would previously have been considered disastrous” — and his May 8 broadcast hit a record low of just 3.4 million viewers.
One television news executive told Status the damage traces directly back to Weiss and ownership.
“It’s easy to sit at home and criticize TV journalism and say how it needs to be done differently or better. But it takes real, serious people and skill to execute this stuff,” the executive said. “Bari and the Ellisonsdemonstrate yet again that this is much harder than it looks. I hope for their business and their talent they start to understand just how badly they’ve miscalculated their approach to news.”
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